Thermal color printers consume a ribbon which bears a sequence of sets of coloring areas.
Each set of coloring areas in general comprises three consecutive color areas resp. cyan, magenta and yellow, each area being the size of a sheet to be printed.
To print a color picture on a page of a support sheet, the three areas of a set of areas are consecutively applied to the page by activating the heater elements of a printing head. In this manner the color picture is reconstituted by superposing the cyan, magenta and yellow colors.
Accordingly printing a page consumes systematically three coloring pages regardless of the size of the picture to be printed, entailing ribbon waste for instance when printing only a few lines of the page.